A column on who gets to decide how money moves in the Global South
Maria Amalia Souza has spent more than four decades watching philanthropy try to solve problems in the Global South while keeping money, authority, and decision-making power somewhere else. Her work begins with a different proposition: the people closest to territories are not merely beneficiaries of change. They are its architects.
As founder of Casa Socio-Environmental Fund and its Director of Global Philanthropy Strategies, Maria Amalia helped create an institution designed to reverse the conventional flow of philanthropic power. Over 21 years, Casa Fund is reaching 6000 grants of community-led initiatives across Brazil and South America, showing that scale does not require distance and that accountability can be built through relationships, knowledge, and belonging.
In Power in Proximity, she explores the politics behind philanthropy, climate finance, and conservation: who holds the money, who defines expertise, who is trusted, and who is expected to adapt. From the arrival of new wealth to the future of the world’s major biomes, the column asks what it would take to move resources and power toward the people and institutions already protecting the living systems on which we all depend.
